Calendar of Events

Saturday Morning Clinical Workshop with Muriel Dimen, Ph.D.

Austen Riggs Center

25 Main St

Stockbridge, Stockbridge, Berkshire01262

March 23, 2013 at 9:30 AM

On Sexuality

Muriel Dimen, Ph.D. is Adjunct Clinical Professor of Psychology, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, and Professor Emerita of Anthropology, Lehman College (CUNY). On the faculties of the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, Adelphi University Derner Institute in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, the Stephen A. Mitchell Center for Relational Psychoanalysis, and other institutes, she is Editor-in-Chief, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, and an Associate Editor, Psychoanalytic Dialogues. She is also a founding board member of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. Muriel Dimen has written Sexuality, Intimacy, Power (Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press, 2003); Surviving Sexual Contradictions (NY: Macmillan, 1986); and The Anthropological Imagination (NY: McGraw-Hill, 1977). She has edited With Culture in Mind: Psychoanalytic Stories (NY: Routledge, 2011) and co-edited Gender in Psychoanalytic Space: Between Clinic and Culture with Virginia Goldner (NY: The Other Press, 2002. Dr. Dimen’s presentation is based on her 2011 paper “Lapsus linguae, Or a slip of the tongue? A sexual violation in an analytic treatment and its personal and theoretical aftermath” (Contemporary Psychoanalysis 47: 36-79). She is currently working on a memoir based on that essay, entitled Flipping the Couch. Muriel Dimen is a Fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities, New York University and practices and supervises in Manhattan.

Dr. Dimen will speak about “Sexual subjectivity,” presenting a case vignette along with it. She will invite the audience to share clinical material as well. Sexuality, right there at the start of psychoanalysis, slipped backstage as object relations made their way forward. Midway through the 20th century, however, the critique of gender, from both within and without the field, allowed sexuality to become (re)problematized. Thus it has become possible for psychoanalysis to address sexual subjectivity phenomenologically: the way sex appears in experience or how we experience it, its conscious, preconscious, and unconscious meanings as subjectively perceived. This project entails further thinking about several relational matters: what we might call sexual self-states; desire, its variousness, its evolution; bodies and bodyminds; intersubjectivity and sexual states; sexuality transmitted from parent to child.